What’s the sexiest job of the 21st century?
It’s not racecar driver or movie star or lead singer. According to the esteemed Harvard Business Review, the answer is obvious – data scientist.
“If ‘sexy’ means having rare qualities that are much in demand, data scientists are already there,” HBR writes. “They are difficult and expensive to hire and, given the very competitive market for their services, difficult to retain. There simply aren’t a lot of people with their combination of scientific background and computational and analytical skills.”
There’s good reason for HBR’s ranking. Business Insider reports that data scientists make $116,840 annually. And a LinkedIn analysis found that a critical skill for data scientists – statistical analysis and data mining – was the second most in-demand skill of 2015.
So what do these people do? Again, we’ll turn to the HBR:
“More than anything, what data scientists do is make discoveries while swimming in data. It’s their preferred method of navigating the world around them. At ease in the digital realm, they are able to bring structure to large quantities of formless data and make analysis possible. They identify rich data sources, join them with other, potentially incomplete data sources, and clean the resulting set. In a competitive landscape where challenges keep changing and data never stop flowing, data scientists help decision makers shift from ad hoc analysis to an ongoing conversation with data.”
Basically, there’s not a company around today that isn’t trying to get smart with data. Data scientists are the people who make that happen, making them some of the most desirable people in the professional realm.
If that’s not sexy, then I don’t know what is.
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